Yamaha joins all-in migration to the public cloud

Thor Olavsrud |
Nov. 25, 2014

Seeking to shift IT staff away from maintenance tasks to focus on innovation, Yamaha has dropped its hosted data center in favor of AWS.

"The cost was not the major driver, though it was one of the drivers," he says. "It was keeping too many of our people from working on what they should be doing, just keeping systems up and running. We have a goal in IT to be an effective business partner. To be effective, what we need is to spend 70 percent of our resources on new initiatives that bring value to the business."

"We have to keep continually changing and adjusting to bring the ration back to 70/30," he adds. "That is our goal, but I'm happy if we can get to about 60. Because of the number of systems that we keep adding, it's hard to get to -- it deteriorates very quickly. But now I'm beginning to see us able to hit that goal more often."

For CIOs facing their own migration, Thomas recommends looking at your infrastructure first and rationalizing what you can. Linux is easy to move, he says, but older Windows environments can be challenging, especially if you have multiple different Windows environments. Windows 2003 environments don't fit well into AWS, he notes.

"Get rid of any older Windows environments you have," he says. "Most companies might have Windows NT environments still around or Windows 2000 environments still around. If you can, get rid of all your old environments and upgrade them to the latest version before you move."